Amazing Spider-Man Colouring & Sticker Book WLD-808S (China)

 Posted: Jan 2015
 Staff: The Editor (E-Mail)

Background

These unauthorised Chinese-published Spider-Man coloring books are so bad, there ought to be a law against them! Oh wait. There is. Copyright law. They're all 100% unauthorised, and I'm sure Marvel/Disney would love to see them shut out of business.

But then if that happened, where would we see such precious gems as these awful disasters?

Story Details

This particular example is 8" x 10.9". It contains 16 tissue-thin pages of black and white line "art", plus an insert double sheet of color stickers.

The art is ghastly. It's a laughable mismatch of traced-over pictures, with the blank spaces filled in by Spider-Man logos and Spider symbols. There's ten different art styles in the mix, and every one is painfully bad. The range of errors and faults is extensive:

  • Childish art. Bad enough to give children a bad name.
  • Printing faults. Blotches and glitches in the printing process.
  • Bad cropping. Images and logos truncated off the edge of the page.
  • Reversed text. On several of the stickers, the text is flipped, or up-side-down.
  • Hideous backgrounds. Stars and silver webbing adorn most of the stickers.

But the most impressive example is the image featuring a bold "Spider-Man" logo – with a sketch of Superman. Really, that says it all!

General Comments

Somewhere in China, a publishing company is very proud of how they have given an illiterate, retarded blind person a second chance in life as a coloring book designer. That's a very laudable social goal, but the commercial product has suffered somewhat as a result.

Overall Rating

I can't see how a product could get any worse than this – unless perhaps the cover was sprayed with Hepatitis C before it left the factory.

Rock-Bottom half-a-web.

 Posted: Jan 2015
 Staff: The Editor (E-Mail)